Enthusiasts Blogging Our Favorite Classifieds
The Grand Prix White 1976 Porsche 930 Turbo Carrera we featured back in May is back up for sale this time with the price reduced by $10K. I don’t know if that reduction will be enough to see it sell, but with its sport seats and wider wheels this 930 has a few interesting options added to what is already a very nice car.
Last month I wrote an article for The Truth About Cars where I covered the special models of the Porsche 924. Recounting the various special editions drew into sharp focus the general lack of any performance gains with those models. Sure, some had sway bars and fog lights – two of the best known performance upgrades in the 1980s. But generally speaking, most of the Porsche 924 limited models were just a special color stripes and/or special interior. The 1976 and 1977 World Championship Edition 924 is probably the best example of that, but before it’s completely dismissed as a mega-poser, it’s worth a look if for no other reason than it’s quite the looker:
I’m hoping this 911 can serve as a data point on market values, but I also suspect eBay is not really the right place for these types of cars so we’ll have to see. As the title states, here we have a Glacier White 1998 Porsche 911 Carrera S, located in Florida, with a mere 3K miles on the clock. I’ve across a few ultra-low mileage examples of the 993 Carrera S and Carrera 4S and their asking prices always blow my mind. Here we have one available as a reserve auction so I’m curious where bidding will take it. As we’d expect with such a car the condition looks pretty much as new and while I wouldn’t agree with the seller that the White over Grey color combination is the “most desired,” Glacier White is a nice looking color on the 993 and certainly less common than Grand Prix White. I just wish these pictures showcased it better.
What is the price for perfection? We saw Andrew look at a perfect and near brand-new W220 S500 yesterday, but his cutting critique of that car was, as several people noted, spot on. It’s not a desirable model, nor is it one that is likely to be collectable anytime soon. For some time, the same was said of the E36 M3. However, quickly things are changing. Several high-priced examples have come to market recently that have investors questioning if the E30 is the go-to it was for the past two years. Most notably, we saw the one-off Giallo Canadian Edition ’94 M3 hit near $65,000. That car looked near showroom fresh, having only accrued 30,000 miles since new. Today’s example has only about one third of that:
Yesterday, searching through bad 1980s movies to watch I came across the Orwellian classic 1984. I sat and stared at the image of John Hurt, slightly bemused that Orwell’s vision of the future was so dark, dire and complicated. Sitting at the end of a head-scratching 2016, 1984 seems in many ways to be such an easy time. Okay, remove the equally crazy politics of the period; telling my students that bombings in downtown London were commonplace when I was growing up confuses them, or that plane hijackings happened almost as often as mass shootings do today, nevermind the environmental and infectious disease disasters of the period. In 1984, you could buy a Volkswagen Jetta GLi for $8,500. Inflation corrected, that’s just below $20,000 – so still quite a deal in the grand scheme. Sure, today’s cars offer more luxury and convenience, and isolation from the driving experience. They are, without a doubt, safer in every measurable characteristic than cars in the 1980s. And faster? Also indisputable, as a new Jetta GLi turbo will positively wipe the floor with this A1’s performance. With only 90 horsepower on tap, you’ll struggle to best speeds most modern cars can do without the driver even blinking. Relatively speaking, this Jetta GLi is slow, loud, unsafe, and not hugely comfortable. Why, then, were they so much fun to drive?
